What makes playing PoE fun for you?

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LMTR14 wrote:

after all the complaining sometimes it is beneficial to have a look at what actually works for you when playing the game and when is playing the game fun

-) progress (level, achievements, challenges, atlas clearing, unique checklist etc.)

What I find most fun with the game is the early gameplay.
- The 10 acts (yikes, eh?). I like having a foundation, a story, and going through it, interacting with characters, and killing bosses and going to new areas.
- Gaining levels quite quickly, and therefore seeing concrete progress in your character
- Finding better gear, as I prefer that over easily trading up. Just a shame it's so damn hard to actually FIND better gear as most is crap.
- Getting to the Lab and getting the first 1-2 ascendancies, as again, this very concretely improves your character

Once I get to level 80-85, progress is much slower, and after the acts the game slowly but surely moves into the reign of grind and utter more grind. Early maps can be fun, but pretty soon it becomes a "job" of ticking off one more circle on the Atlas, with in truth nothing in the story department as foundation.

I come more from an (actual) RPG background, so it's quite natural I prefer that part of the game more than mindless grinding. Also why, after high initial hopes, I was disheartened and disappointed with the Delve league. So much potential squandered by layer upon layer of mindless grind :-(

Building the builds, especially the sweet spot between "this is overpowered!" and "this is just plain dumb".

New stuff is fun.

Also much fun is progress and difficulty - but not kind of difficulty whats time consuming and blindly grind (its opposite for fun) - I like difficulties whats needs creativity and many ways around it. And feeling of actually influence to whats goes in game. Have tools to cut things and tools noot behind RNG but about actual skill and knowing how things can happen or not and where. So using tools and have them many. Combining them to get interesting results. Treasures? somthing unusual.. Like dropping reliquary key.

Havent had this fun this league sadly.
Some minor one was..
Yeah

Building the character. I like the variety of skill choices and combinations. I also like the variety of loot that also contributes to the character build and ongoing changes and tweaks.